Fashion

Armani in Full

Even as the Guggenheim Museum plans a massive retrospective of Giorgio Armani’s 25-year reign, the 66-year-old designer is facing youthful competition and a quandary over his future. Should he sell his ever expanding $2 billion empire—to Bernard Arnault of LVMH, perhaps, or to Gucci chief Domenico De Sole? In his Milanese palazzo, the famously distant, enigmatic Italian who kicked the stufﬁng out of American fashion in the 1970s, and whose clothes are still the ultimate chic for the likes of Jodie Foster, Ricky Martin, and Matt Damon, shows the author his demons, his sorrows, and the refusal to compromise that keeps him solo.

Step inside the pale rectangular palazzo on Milan’s Via Borgonuovo and you find Aladdin’s Cave, a mysterious space, half shrouded in dark but the treasure bathed in light. Everything Giorgio Armani needs for his autumn-winter collection is right there: demon-bright slippers alongside composed and haughty ladies’ shoes, glittering crystal cuffs blazing away at their meeker rivals in amethyst and teal, purses of caramel leather and silvery-pink clutches, slender voile trousers and velvet tops with a golden sheen, cashmere shawls a mile wide and thick as snowdrifts. Oh—and the jackets. They are surprisingly black and snug this season, skimming breasts and rib cages to make a quiet landing at the threadlike hips of the models who flaunt them.

In the midst of this profusion stands the great Italian designer himself, 66, in aviator glasses, dark sweatpants, and a black T-shirt which, when he bends to make a thousand adjustments to his creations, occasionally rides up to reveal a perpetually tanned and firm strip of Armani stomach. He is a neatly assembled man, subdued features set beneath bold cobalt eyes in a dark face that is handsome even when scowling. Which happens to be his expression just now.

Blushing furiously on the runway stage before him stands a very young model, a long pulled-taffy stretch of a girl, blond hair scooped into pigtails. She is not beautiful, which is fine with Armani. (Once, he hired the supermodel Claudia Schiffer, and she was lovely, all right, but “she was like a cammello,” Armani decided. A camel. “She didn’t move.” Besides, he added, “everyone says that the fashion of Armani is androgynous. Without breasts, without hair. And it’s true: sometimes when I watch the fashion show, I realize that there is a gorgeous body in place of a beautiful face.”)

On the other hand, here on the runway, there is obviously a bit too much gorgeous body on view. Over the model’s glittery panty hose is a pair of trousers, slashed by a black geometric pattern but otherwise quite transparent. Armani points, horrified.

“This must be changed! She cannot be allowed to look like that.” In desperation, he looks about for succor, for the exposed blushing girl, for himself, for everything Armani represents. Someone rushes onstage with opaque undergarments for the model, and he nods moody assent.

“Right, he is gallant—that’s the perfect word for Giorgio,” agrees the model Lauren Hutton when the subject of Armani’s chivalry comes up. She has known him since the early 80s, a friendship ignited after she clandestinely slipped into one of his trench coats on the set of American Gigolo. It was her co-star, Richard Gere, who was endowed in the film with most of the great Armanis. “Quite stylized, big shoulders and thin waists, thin lapels,” Gere recalls, but what struck him were the subtle tints of the clothing: “It was like looking at an old carpet where the natural colors blend and even bleed,” he says, “as opposed to some of these new carpets made of plastic fibers where the colors are monolithic.” The actor was smitten, for life: “I don’t know any other designer,” he says pointedly. Well beyond Gere’s and Hutton’s youths, their relationships with the designer continue, the latest Armani garments placed at their disposal.

One month later, I am reminded of this need of Italy’s billionaire designer to devise protection for himself and others. Inside his spare penthouse duplex, designed by Peter Marino (just a few floors above the runway and the models, in fact), we are seated as far apart as possible, the only two people dining on very good pasta topped with fresh tomatoes, at opposite ends of an impressive expanse of table. Despite his constant posing with Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie Foster, Annette Bening—all of whom he dresses on-screen and off, many of whom he genuinely likes—Armani is famously distant, lonely, fearful of intrusion by anybody outside his family. “Because he &hellip; he has no friends,” Armani’s 60-year-old sister, Rosanna, announces with unsettling candor. “When I ask him about it, he says, ‘Tell me: when do I have time to make myself friends?’ and that is very true.”

And yet the conversation into which Armani slips at his home is surprisingly intimate, as though he has taken a vow to abandon caution. I have just returned from his rosy stone palazzo in the flat, northern countryside—one of his three vacation homes (the others are in Saint-Tropez and Pantelleria, a volcanic island near Sicily)—which is executed in an arch-18th-century manner, fronted by chalky columns, blue spruces, and gray mosaic walks. Rows of leather-bound botanical treatises, quite untouched, line pomegranate-colored walls. French doors open onto swans sailing across an artificial pond, acres of cropped lawns, inhabited mainly by deer, goats, and dogs from the pound. All this was once the property (I am gravely assured by an Armani relative) of a Milanese count.

“No, not a count,” Armani says, correcting the provenance of the palazzo he bought two decades ago. “By a gentleman who became a big toothpaste manufacturer.” Indeed, the mansion hails straight from the 50s, which was its signal advantage as far as Armani was concerned. “One mustn’t cheat here. Because I detest for people to think I got this house to feel like a lord of the manor, with a long history. This is the reason I bought it: it had everything in it when I bought it—plumbing, air-conditioning. There you are!”

The designer appears eager to discuss every particle of his life, unvarnished. What’s the use of spinning pretty tales? Giuseppe Brusone, Armani’s managing director and key company deputy for the last 15 years, has recently quit—the third major executive to do so this year—and the founder of the empire is feeling especially vulnerable. He thinks he knows what his rivals are saying about him. Armani will collapse. Armani is finished.

“So once again I have to show that I am capable of surviving. That is always what I’ve had to do in life: to show I am capable of surviving. You understand?” he says. “So that, in one sense, that helps a lot—to work, to show strength. And on the other hand, you hit 65 and life is &hellip; ” Armani raises his palms skyward. Desolate.

“I am scared of the grotesque. When I show myself on the runway at the end of a fashion show—yes, I have a physique which is pleasing, young. But in a few years, I will feel less honest about it. Because young people &hellip; perhaps they won’t put their trust in an old gentleman like me in five years. Because fashion is made by young people. Not old gentlemen.” He picks at his pasta.

“For example, I do not dance. No, because above all, in order to dance among the young, either one has to be young or you have a physique that permits you to move around like a young person—and you lose your head at that kind of moment. But I am ashamed. I have a fear of appearing ridiculous! You understand? So that has come to me over the years. You have to watch somebody dance, see how he excites in a sexy way, in an aesthetic way. If not, it’s nothing! It is pathetic!”

These are his demons: the dissolution of Armani the man and the fear of seeing a reversal of fortune in Armani the company. In his eyes they are, in a way, one and the same. Fifteen years ago, Sergio Galeotti, Armani’s lover, inspiration, and founding business partner, died at age 40 of aids. “Whatever I did in work was done for Sergio. And Sergio did everything for me. So that was the heart,” Armani says simply. Back then, too, he recalls, everyone whispered: “Beh, Galeotti is dead now, Armani is going to leave. He is going to crumble.” And yet, just last year, Armani the man earned $100 million, while Armani the company is worth more than $2 billion, with more than $850 million in annual sales, according to its most recent published report (thus making it the most profitable fashion house in Italy). It is swiftly buying up practically everything in sight: a portion of an Italian textile factory so that, Armani explains, he can control “the means of production”; a former Nestlé chocolate factory, which his company is transforming into a theater for his fashion shows. He is also buying back his franchises in Australia and Sweden, and putting the finishing touches on a gigantic Armani superstore sprawling across an entire Milanese block, filled with brand-new Armani products: furniture and a home collection, a line of cosmetics made in conjunction with L’Oréal, a new scent for women called Mania.

Small wonder then that the Big Boys have come courting: Bernard Arnault, the acquisitive chief of the luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH, has made no secret of his lust, and Gucci’s Domenico De Sole has also looked upon Armani’s firm with longing. Armani, the monarch of what is so far a private company, is flattered, worried, in a serious quandary. There are rumors that this is why Brusone left: because the king just couldn’t make up his mind whose hand he would choose, or even if he should choose. But how can Armani, the creator, possibly consent to be under someone else’s thumb?

“I have no associates. I am not in the stock market. I am beholden to no one in what I do. If I spend billions on a fashion show, I spend billions. It’s not public. And if I am in the stock market, I am obligated to account for things, and to show what the business is doing.” He shakes his head.

“For years and years every person who comes up to me, be it just to chat or to look for a job, asks me, ‘Well, what is your plan for the future? What are you going to do?’” he says unhappily. “Because people recognize that I am responsible, I am in charge—of everything. And I have no reply. I have answers, but I don’t dare reply. If I am depressed, I say, ‘No, no, I want to give up on everything. I want to leave everything.’ If I feel like working, I say, ‘No, I am still young.’ I feel as though there is still time.”

And to make matters even more complicated—to add to all the fuss and triumph and the deepening sense of mortality—the Guggenheim is holding on this, the 25th anniversary of Armani’s business opening, an enormous retrospective of his work. It is the museum’s first retrospective devoted to a single designer, and one that will travel after its New York showing to the glorious Bilbao, Spain, outpost designed by Frank Gehry, and then, possibly, to an old customhouse in Venice, one-third of which is occupied by nuns. It is a tour that will take several years. But when I ask Armani what he thought when first presented with the idea of cultural immortalization by tentative emissaries from Guggenheim director Tom Krens, the reaction is swift, uncalculated: “Uh &hellip; I must tell you that when they shot that idea by me, my first thought was: How pretentious!” His initial impulse was to say no.

Yet, at the same time, Armani thought to himself: At last. On display at the Guggenheim will be not just the classic Armani jackets which everyone has seen, but also the Armani the world has rejected. “For instance, shoes that I made a few years ago—15 years ago—thrown into a box in a corner. Not considered by the press, not accepted.”

Visitors would come, in other words, and see a bit of the hidden Armani. And how ironic that it is the world’s most famous and gifted designer who warns from the outset, Don’t trust appearances. The grand houses; the servants who, much to his annoyance, dust the dessert plates with cocoa powder; the 20 exercise machines stacked up in his personal gym hard by the ultraviolet tanning equipment; the Oscar winners who wear his gowns and tuxedos on television: all this came late in life. In a sense, too late. Discovering that one of his rare vacations—to be spent in a six-bedroom villa in Mexico, complete with cook, car, and chauffeur—would cost him $60,000 for the week, private plane included, he gasped. “That much?”

“Mr. Armani, you are rich—enjoy your money,” he was told.

“I know I am rich,” the designer replied. “But still it is difficult for me. When you grow up like I grew up, it is not easy.”

Across the dining-room table, Armani twists the corners of his mouth. “I didn’t spend my youth in the Aiglon School of Switzerland. I am not a friend of the son of Agnelli. You understand very well.” He pauses. “It’s a tough life. I don’t say this to get your sympathy, but it’s hard. I am alone.”

Giorgio wanted to get ahead. And he worked all his life to that end,” Rosanna Armani explains, this time (but not always) with uncluttered sympathy. She worked for him until two years ago and was very happy to retire to a life of travel and remove herself from her dominant older brother. “He was certain that he had what it takes, both intellectually and creatively. He made a lot of sacrifices.” In fact, she adds, Armani always says, “My sister lives the life I always wanted.”

Once a top Italian model as well as an actress—she landed a small part in Luchino Visconti’s 1960 movie Rocco and His Brothers—Rosanna resembled in her heyday a miniature Audrey Hepburn. (“Less subtle,” her brother corrects archly, “but she had the same spirit.”) The siblings grew up in the Northern Italian village of Piacenza. (Their elder brother, Sergio, now dead, was the only one never to become famous, and it gnawed at him: eventually he developed chronic depression.) “When I started, I had nothing. Because my family was really, really, really poor,” Armani tells his 29-year-old niece, Roberta, whenever she complains about anything. Armani’s grandfather Lodovico made 19th- century-style wigs for the local theater. His father was a shipping manager, his mother, Maria, a housewife.

“She was hard. Hard. Hard,” Armani recalls, summoning an anecdote from when he was seven and his mother demanded that he baby-sit his kid sister at night. “And I had watched a film where there was an episode where children watched from the window, and the house burned and they were abandoned, and the boys screamed.” He remembers bursting into tears in front of his mother, worried the same fate would befall him and Rosanna without their parents. “And you know what she did? And I think it was a good idea. She did this to me”—Armani gives himself a swift slap across the face. “She did that to give me power. You can’t be afraid of that. She taught me something.”

If the child Giorgio was terrified of death and abandonment, it was because World War II was raging, Allied bombs falling on Piacenza. Passing the local movie theater one evening, Rosanna stopped to gape at the marquee posters—Snow White was playing—while her brother was called across the street by friends. The boys were setting fire to a bit of gunpowder they had extracted from an Allied cartridge, watching it burn and sparkle. Fascinated, young Giorgio bent over the sparks.

“And so the stuff exploded,” Rosanna explains. “Giorgio fled, covered in flames, glass scattered everywhere.” He spent 40 days in the hospital. “I was tiny, but I remember how he used to scream because they used to place him in a vat of pure alcohol because the medical system then was, shall we say, a little primitive.” What remains, she adds, is minor enough: a scar on his foot where his shoe burned, some eye pain when there is too much light. But less visible scars were long in healing. “Whenever a plane would pass overhead he would throw himself into a ditch,” she recalls.

By their early adulthood, the war was over. Rosanna was launched on her glamorous career as a model; beside her was Giorgio, whom she introduced to “Milano bene, as we say,” the powerhouse names of high society. Her brother met Tennessee Williams, Anna Magnani.

“That helped me a lot and also helped Giorgio,” she says. He was a compact and beautiful young man, lucky enough in the late 50s to land a job as a window dresser (and later as a buyer of men’s wear) at the fairly innovative department store La Rinascente.

“He was a very shy boy,” says Natalia Aspesi, a tough, intelligent critic who happens to be Italy’s foremost fashion journalist. She has known the designer for 40 years. “I was a friend of his fiancée. He had a girl at the time.” At my expression she bursts out laughing. “He had a girlfriend. They were very much in love.”

“I have had women in my life. And sometimes men,” Armani replies when asked about this part of his personal history. He seems genuinely amused by questions dealing with his romantic evolution. “You mean from a sexual point of view? But you know very well that to do this work one must have a free mind. Often one doesn’t have the time to worry about others. And above all when we’re talking about a woman.” Here, Armani rolls his eyes.

“A woman needs a lot—a lot of care. Even if she’s young. Above all, at that period of time. Now women are just like men— they work, it’s different. But at that time the little fiancée, she needed to be courted, to have attention paid to her. A lot, a lot of attention.”

In 1966 at the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi, he met Sergio Galeotti, an architect 11 years his junior; Armani was then 32 and starting to make a name for himself as a talented designer for the textile magnate Nino Cerruti, among others. He had already fallen under the gentle spell of Italian fabrics. He also worshiped the French designer Yves Saint Laurent, and carefully examined his extraordinary craftsmanship.

Galeotti, expansive, always the optimist, assured Armani he was wasting his time working for others: he had to strike out on his own with his own collection. “Right away he made me Papa—I felt right away responsible for him and for his life” is how Armani describes their connection. “It was really as if he were my child.” (Indeed, Armani says, “Papa” has always been his role in life—toward everyone. Sergio abandoned his parents, hometown, initial career, flinging his destiny at Armani’s feet. “I was responsible for this boy, for the future of this boy, so as not to betray his trust.”)

“That,” he concludes, “was the reason Sergio came to Milano to work with me.” And then: “Suddenly it became a relationship of deep affection.” And something more: a complicated fusion of the personal and the professional, of devotion and material success—a dazzling conspiracy, as Armani remembers it. “Love is too reductive a term. It was a great complicity vis-à-vis life and the rest of the world.” It was really more of a con game at first, Armani explains. Galeotti pretended to be the business end of the venture, although “naturally Sergio had no experience in business, and naturally behind Sergio there was me. But in the eyes of the world—even for him—we pushed the idea that Sergio was the big guy behind it all in this business. And I was the creator.”

The men sold their Volkswagen and plowed $10,000 into their venture, renting a two-room office on the Corso Venezia. It wasn’t money they were after, Armani insists. “We just wanted to make something good.” Nonetheless they made a fortune fairly quickly, just as his companion had predicted. The longtime ascendancy of the French—the luxurious profligacy of postwar Christian Dior, the voluptuous fantasies of Yves Saint Laurent —was over. Armani stepped in, his clothes the essence of suppleness and sobriety. As he himself observes, “I learned ultimately how to use the defects of others.”

It was great timing. The mid-70s, says fashion critic Aspesi, “was no longer for the bourgeoisie, or the Revolution.” It was a more restrained era, one particularly suited to the quieter urges and moods of the temperate designer. “He understood people needed to dress more simply—but with some kind of nobility,” says Aspesi. “He had this feeling people were tired, they wanted something new.” Armani literally kicked the stuffing out of jackets, imparting a fluid, unbroken line, a discreet hint of flattery to men in 1974; then, the following season, he did the same for women. It was they who made him a star. Especially American women. The media did their part, too: by 1982, Armani had appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

“America was the first to understand the importance of Armani,” says Aspesi, because this was the pioneering country where women suddenly found themselves in the workplace and in urgent need of new forms of armor: business jackets—but amiable ones that paradoxically enhanced women’s appeal.

With his own ever present need for refuge, Armani clearly empathized with these conflicting female desires: “I hope, sincerely, I do hope that [my jackets] have given them a relaxed feeling of security,” he told an Italian magazine, “and the salutary feeling of being unattackable.” He spoke of these jackets as though they were white knights he sends out into the world in order to bestow “an assurance, an alliance,” on the women who bought them; he said he hoped they saved their wearers from the suggestive impertinence of men. This message has transmitted itself to all sorts of women. “The most important thing Armani clothes give me is a kind of security,” says Sophia Loren. “When I have to face an audience, God knows how many doubts I have, and when I wear his clothes, I have no more doubts.”

At the same time, as curator Harold Koda, who is helping organize the Guggenheim exhibition, points out, Armani was giving the wearer a feeling of looseness and ease. “Relaxing the construction—that’s always going to be part of his work,” he says, even now that Armani jackets are cleaving to the body. “With Armani there’s a closeness, but not this constriction.”

Two decades ago, this monklike restraint sat ill with some of the more flamboyantly prosperous. Koda, who was a director at the Fashion Institute of Technology (and has just been named curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute), recalls the reaction of certain F.I.T. donors, robed in their bright and sumptuous Saint Laurents and Ungaros: “I think of Geneva airport: it was beautiful clothing, but wealthy. And when they saw Armani they just couldn’t understand it. It seemed to them poor.”

Nonetheless, by the early 80s, Armani had already launched Emporio Armani stores (there are now 121 of them worldwide) for well-heeled youth. The new publishing executive Jacqueline Onassis was wearing his clothes, as were Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, and Martin Scorsese. It was an extraordinary time, a natural alliance between the romance of Hollywood, where clothing taste is, to say the least, erratic, and the quiet drama of Armani.

This was no happenstance encounter. At Armani’s country house is a pair of immense custom-built armoires bulging with 14 shelves of videos, everything from Arachnophobia to My Left Foot. “We were the first fashion house to open a West Coast office—that was in ‘88,” explains Wanda McDaniel, a former Los Angeles journalist, whose job it is to rope into Armani’s stable Annette Bening, Angelina Jolie, an occasional Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Pfeiffer (so bereft of jewelry at the 1989 Oscars that she wore McDaniel’s engagement ring). “He cuts very good for my body,” reports Arnold Schwarzenegger.

You mean he makes your body look good? Schwarzenegger is asked.

“No, I make my body look good myself,” he corrects me severely. “But he cuts well: rounded shoulders, slender waist, jackets that are long so it doesn’t make you look like a truckdriver.” And another thing: “When I went down to visit him in Milan last year, he showed me his whole new swimwear line, the European ones, small briefs. Ahhhhh, they look sexy, I’m telling you.”

When Sean Connery’s bags were lost en route to Italy, the Rome Armani store remained open after hours to accommodate him. Even more memorable crises have been averted. At the 1987 Oscars, when best actress was won by Jodie Foster for The Accused, the triumphant star turned up in famously disastrous attire, bought off the rack at some store in Rome she happened to be passing when she heard she had been nominated.

“Kind of a sea-foamy, greenish-blue dress with an ornate train in the back, and kind of above the knee in the front” is Foster’s rueful memory of the garment. “Hey—it was 1987! I was really young—I was 25! Every time the worst-dressed list comes out, there is that dress. I’ve been living it down for the rest of my life.” The next thing the actress knew, there was Armani, rescuing her from herself on a subsequent Oscar evening with a delectable copper-colored tuxedo “where you can pretty much see my cleavage very well.” She was impressed. “And he did all the alterations himself, hooked me and my breasts up with double-stick tape. So it was”—she pauses delicately—“a very intimate first meeting.”

“Oh, the cinema for Giorgio is really part of his genetic makeup,” explains his sister. “Since forever.”

‘Giorgio, you are beautiful, young, and rich. What more do you want?” Galeotti would ask his somber friend. “He helped me to believe in my own work. In my energy,” recalls the designer, who had once believed in himself scarcely at all.

And then Galeotti discovered he was mortally ill. By this point the two partners, although best friends, were no longer in love. “Because as you well know, from a sexual viewpoint naturally &hellip; ” Armani shrugs, his mouth twisting wryly. “The passion doesn’t last. But something very important is left behind.”

Didn’t you want to quit being a designer after Galeotti died? I ask.

“I thought about that. Right away,” says Armani. “And during the year of his illness, I sustained myself with medications, in order to be able to stand the voice of Sergio on the telephone.&hellip; He spoke with a weak voice, an old voice. It was almost impossible. So I begged for help.”

But each time he replaced the receiver after speaking to his dying friend, he noticed that returning to work was a more effective antidepressant than the pills he was swallowing. “It forced me to forget that moment. And I thought, Well, if I leave this work, all the hopes of Sergio, all that he has put into this enterprise—it’s unique. It’s a weakness I cannot show. I must force myself to supersede all of that. I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. And it is that, it is he who gives me the strength even now to continue.”

He means that literally. Photographs of a laughing Sergio, balding, middle-aged, with a slight paunch and a cigarette, the opposite of Armani in every way, have pride of place in all his various bedrooms. Every once in a while Armani travels to Forte dei Marmi, where he still owns the house he once shared with Galeotti, only to find “he is still there all the time. He is always there in my head. I see him walking down the steps, I see him in the garden, with his cigarette—he is talking to friends. He is always there. So I &hellip; I go there because Sergio was there, but it—it’s difficult. Absolutely difficult.”

To everyone’s surprise, Armani, even after the death of his partner, proved resilient, more vital commercially than ever. But internally a lot about him changed. “He really closed up a lot,” reports Roberta Armani, the designer’s tall, beautiful niece, who grew up knowing only the reserved Armani, loving but remote. “He became more serious, more introverted.” Also, she says, “when Sergio was alive, my uncle was able to think about creating, creating, creating.” That freedom was now severely curtailed. Armani had always been far more involved in business decisions than he let on; now, however, these were his alone to make.

Certainly, he seemed to be making long-term plans to fill the void Galeotti left by employing his relatives. “You see, for him the family is blood. That’s it: blood,” explains a colleague. As a girl, Roberta was informed by her uncle, whose linguistic skills are limited to Italian and French, that she should devote herself to making up for his deficiencies. “Speak English and then help me,” he implored. Now married to Angelo Moratti, whose family owns the biggest oil refinery in the Mediterranean as well as a Milan soccer team, she does indeed speak fluent English—and works in the publicity department of the uncle who designed every detail of her wedding attire (almost $5,000 of sweeping ivory fitted chemise) down to the bouquet. Her half-sister, Silvana, helps design his women’s fashions. Along with Armani’s sister and a few trusted employees, they form the designer’s ever present tribe, vacationing with him, surrounding him. He is almost never alone.

But this type of existence can seem odd. Aspesi, one of the few outsiders invited to Armani’s house on Pantelleria, found the experience so disconcerting she resolved never to return: “Because it was boring. Noioso. Oooo. Borissimo!” she says, groaning. “If you wanted to go out of the house you were an enemy! You should stay there! Yes! Because he wants to have everybody there! We went one year and—basta!”

Even family members have their problems with Armani. “I cannot enter into competition again with Giorgio. It is not worth it,” says Rosanna. Things are far better between them now than a couple of years back when she would supervise the advertising photos. “But that is the way he is. If there is one little thing in the midst of a thousand that are fine, he will remember it his whole life,” she insists. And bring it up years later: “Remember that hideous photograph?” And Rosanna would say, “Yes, Giorgio, but that was the only one you didn’t like.”

Gabriella Forte, for years his right-hand woman, was even more direct—this while she was still working for him (she quit in 1994). “Giorgio Armani is not big on compliments,” she said. “The first thing he says to you in the morning is ‘You need a face-lift—you look destroyed.’ He never says at the end of a day, ‘You did a good job.’”

“He is able to tell you exactly the things that hurt you,” explains Roberta. “It’s like, say, the worst worry in your life is to lose your hair—he will tell you you’re almost bald. He told me many things. He screams at you for whatever. But after two minutes—forget it. He doesn’t hold a grudge. Assolutamente.” And then, too, she adds, a lot of people just don’t understand her uncle. For instance, on vacations Armani has his daily regimen carefully worked out: “He wakes us up very early in the morning. He knocks on the door, saying, ‘you bitch, wake up, it’s one p.m.’ And it turns out to be 7:30.” She shrugs.

“But then he has ways of showing how much he loves you. For example, he calls you ‘Disgraziata.’” Miserable wretch. “That’s his way of saying, ‘Darling.’ People don’t understand that.”

About his fabled temper, Armani is pretty unrepentant, considering his outbursts, at worst, a pragmatic necessity. “I must make decisions every five minutes and give the impression of being sure of myself! Sincerely, this is the cause of my verbal violence. And sometimes I even use words, Italian ones—stronzo or cazzo!” Shithead, prick. He grins, only slightly sheepish. “That is normal. Between us this is what we say all the time. It’s part of the life I live with my co-workers—most of my life is spent this way. For the rest there is little that remains.”

He brooks no distractions. In a country of magnificent hedonism, Armani might well be the only Italian Puritan. The very frescoes of his Milan palazzo are covered up in order not to divert attention from work. His homes contain few paintings—male bodies, adequately rendered—because, Aspesi believes, the selection of artworks is for Armani yet another source of endless worry. “He doesn’t think, I like it and I want it, he thinks, Is it fashionable?” says Aspesi. “For this reason I say he is quite unsure of himself.” His love affairs are of long duration (former flames transmuted, after passion subsides, into a perpetual part of the tribe), and always with colleagues. He doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks, and accuses those who indulge of being “wild.” His evenings are a bowl of pasta, bed at 11, quiet. “He dresses actors, but he does not hang with actors,” says a former employee.

“I do not move,” Armani agrees simply. Why should he? Matt Damon, clutching his Oscar, thanks Armani from across an ocean. Ricky Martin rocks in his trousers. Jodie Foster wears just his clothes and “my running pants.” Gere’s alternative to Armanis is, he says, “my Levi’s.” The designer courts them all, but only up to a point. “One thing I can vouch for, in all the years I have known him, Armani has never paid anyone to wear his clothes,” says another person who worked for him. “He’d rather sit and sew buttons.”

Between the king and his subjects is an equally intricate and finely choreographed dance. On the one hand, beneath the explosions, Armani is famously softhearted: he almost never fires anyone and can be touchingly generous to total strangers. (A distressed Milanese lady who recently wrote a newspaper that she was about to lose her home now owns it free and clear, courtesy of the designer, Roberta Armani tells me: “You know—this is being God.”) On the other hand, there is something tough and impenetrable within Armani that doesn’t in the least distress him. It is this that prompts him to speak of himself, without embarrassment, in the third person.

“There are people who’ve worked for me, 15 or 20 years,” he says. “But before me they are still the young people who have just joined up; they are still trembling a bit before Armani. It’s still the same thing to this day. Yes, they still tremble after 20 years. I am not a beast and not a monster. They still have that profound respect—and that, I believe, I want to keep. I want to keep it. At the end of this story, I want them to be like that.”

As with all royalty, it is simply understood, say some who have worked for him, that those around Armani will share his convictions—indeed, his life. When the designer Gianni Versace was still alive, and his wildly sexual clothes and intemperate lifestyle the rage of the early 1990s, the hostility between the two fashion houses could scarcely be contained. Anyone who devoutly believes, as does Armani, that “flesh visible under chiffon blouses is a scandal!” was not likely to appreciate the flagrant dazzle of Versace. (“He doesn’t enjoy his life” was the late designer’s verdict on his rival.) Armani’s people received the distinct impression that Milan was not big enough for them both.

“I was a witness to a lot of that anger,” says an acquaintance. “A lot of mud was slung on Versace’s part, too, you know. You’d hear, ‘What, another beige suit on the runway? He’s dressing the mothers of Italy!’”

With the 1997 murder of Versace, however, some of the anger went out of Armani. Indeed, he now insists their relations had been quite cordial (“I swear to you!”), although the anecdote he selects to emphasize his goodwill toward Versace is oddly instructive: “I’ll tell you something I never told anyone before,” he says, recalling an encounter with the hedonistic designer one broiling afternoon in Rome, on the Spanish Steps. Versace spoke to him, recalls Armani, with instant and surprisingly voluble fellowship: “You know something, Giorgio? You dress elegant women. You dress sophisticated women. Io vesto delle zoccole.”

“I dress sluts,” I translate aloud.

“Molto slutty,” agrees Armani, who appears to have no trouble understanding this much English. “And at that moment I understood that Gianni Versace was a persona sincera. He had one idea of fashion for women. And I had another conception. But there was no hatred. There was no antagonism. He went down his road, I down my road.”

But Armani’s road is rocky, filled with pitfalls, he feels—with considerable justice. Just two years ago in Paris, his fall fashion show was stopped hours before it was to begin by a swarm of adamant French police. Security reasons, said the cops, who thereupon blocked at least 1,000 people—Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Bryan Adams among them—from entering the freshly pitched Armani tent on the Place Saint Sulpice. Armani employees (and they are not alone in their suspicions) wonder if French jealousy didn’t play a major role in stopping the show. Inside the vast empty space spouted the lovely Saint Sulpice fountain, ringed by idle waiters holding platters of untouched hors d’oeuvres. Models with gorgeous new clothes on their backs and no stars or photographers to impress wept their hearts out.

“So we said, Fuck off—we did the show for the people, for the models, for the staff,” recalls Roberta Armani. It was like a movie, staff applauding wildly, tears of pride and anguish rolling down their faces, a reported $1 million poured straight down the drain. And Armani? “You would have expected him to go crazy,” says his niece. Instead, he said, “O.K. We’ll go to the movies.” The food was given to the homeless.

Naturally the designer feels beleaguered. His major rival these days is Tom Ford of Gucci, a formidable and celebrated competitor, often inspired by fashions of earlier decades—especially the 70s—and applauded by the young.

“Gucci,” Armani repeats coldly. “Gucci is an assembler of things. It seems that Tom Ford finds these little bits and pieces everywhere and puts them together. Above all, things that were made by other people. Me—what I do with my pins, I don’t do only at the last minute. I see the first piece of material. I am there from the beginning with my associates. I do the work of a tailor.” This is not simple pique speaking. The blue eyes darken with pain. He is again feeling forlorn, misunderstood. “No one knows how much time I spend—so that’s the problem.”

The designer has no patience with the American press, so adoring of certain of his rivals, so herdlike, he believes. “They are on the telephone instantly: ‘What are you doing this season?’ The 1970s is the reply. So the editors get together and say, ‘Let’s do the 1970s.’” His voice turns icy with contempt. “So I feel, at heart, that these newspapers publish what they feel they should publish. And not what is beautiful. And that’s the truth. They live a snobbish fashion.”

And now some of these outsiders expect him to fuse his company with that of the enemy, a temptation Armani wonders if he can resist. “So that makes me scared,” he says bluntly. “Perhaps because I haven’t yet decided whether to go with Gucci or with Arnault. It’s a bit frantic. Do you understand that?”

And yet, how can he possibly join forces? wonders Armani, when his richer would-be partners, led by the dynamic American Domenico De Sole, might just order him to make his exclusive couture line, Black Label, more mass-market. “And I have to explain to financial people,” he says despairingly, “what the philosophy is of Black Label compared with the other brands? It’s impossible. Impossible! That’s the truth. And De Sole, he has this kind of thought process, this activist spirit, this American spirit—to climb up, up, up.”

It is no small irony that it is the Guggenheim, the archetypal modern American museum, originally devoted to abstract art and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, that now celebrates Armani, a creator known for his demure and classical restraint. The fact that Armani is not an artist is of small importance to the museum’s towering director, six feet five inches of wily skills, dry humor, and wild notions. Tom Krens is famous for his decision to mount two years back a show devoted entirely to motorcycles and sponsored by BMW.

That exhibition drew 325,000 people in just 66 days, but it was clearly born of love. (Krens’s own motorcycle, a gleaming black BMW that resembles nothing so much as an outsize insect, stands before the employees’ entrance of the museum.) Krens readily admits that in discussing Armani “you are not talking about my field.” Still, the exhibition has its charms, as far as he is concerned. It’s a fair bet that Armani’s creations, at least 200 pieces set in a seemingly closed and tranquil world by architect Jean Nouvel and stage director Robert Wilson, will draw a fine, biker-size crowd, only probably (more to the point) wealthier.

“Given the fact that it’s not in our plans to be any less prominent than we have been in the last two years, it could be sizable, the attraction,” Krens says with conscious irony, because he is not impervious to either showmanship or big bucks.

Last December it was reported by The New York Times that Armani had promised the museum at least $5 million, a gift the newspaper claimed would ultimately climb to $15 million. (“We haven’t decided yet how much,” Armani protests, clearly discomfited by the subject.) This spurt of generosity, insist both the director and the designer, erupted about eight months after Armani had consented to an exhibition of his work, and only because, says Krens, the museum made the pitch.

Did you say, “Mr. Armani, you’re so rich—we could use a few pennies?” Krens is asked.

“It sort of goes like that,” he concedes. So, the director concludes, biting back a smile, “although you don’t start every conversation by soliciting gifts,” nonetheless the subject does pop up. Even when you happen to be dealing with a newly anointed god. “Armani has emerged as an icon,” he explains. “Just the way Rauschenberg is emerging as an icon in his field.”

Whatever unspoken reasons the museum may have for putting his clothes on display, these are likely not Armani’s. He knows, for instance, that the most innovative of his creations—a Japanese collection he describes as “a kind of dream,” an especially graceful Moroccan-style show, inspired by the 1990 film adaptation of Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, both from the last decade—were also the most unloved by critics and sold poorly. It will be the Guggenheim that brings these exiles home. For this he is grateful. After all, there are many people—the editors in black glasses and lofty heels who inform him his clothes never evolve, the Americans who honestly believe Armani is, like the late Emilio Pucci, heir to some noble fortune—whom it is really necessary to disabuse. “They don’t know in the slightest the background of Armani,” he says.

And so, it is time to show the work. To hand over the volume of his life—minus the final chapter, which, in any case, Armani would frankly rather do without.

“I saw that photo of myself in [a recent] Playboy—it made me look all wrinkly!” the designer snaps one morning at his vice president for public relations. “I may be old, but I am not that old!”

“He is afraid of losing control,” says Rosanna. That’s why her brother rarely drinks, for example. “He does not want to lose control at any moment.” After all, he has a lot to lose—not just a kingdom.

It wasn’t merely the wrinkles that bothered him, Armani says—it was the type of wrinkles, among other flaws on display. So unaesthetic. Such bad lighting. Such poor timing: “That day, you know, I didn’t have well-tended hands. This happens from time to time, yes. But in a photograph, you cannot allow yourself to have badly tended fingernails.”

But isn’t it a horrible burden to be obliged to appear forever perfect?

“No, you have to appear comme il faut, not perfect,” he insists. “Because I have these enormous physical defects. Sometimes I have this diabolical look on my face.” Immediately his expression changes, and you can sense his delight. That protean face, those refined but indifferently tended hands, the eloquent, civilized clothes—perhaps from time to time they lead their own life behind Armani’s back, but never beyond his control. “I adore it when they take my photograph,” he says, “and my hands take on a certain violence.”